Lena Jeon
Video Game Production and Design
MS in Game Design and Development at USC
Video Game Production and Design
MS in Game Design and Development at USC
Making games so I can make them for a living.
I hope to use my skills to help produce games in the gaming industry.
I am currently based in Los Angeles.
Academic background: B.A. in Computer Science, Minor in Japanese from UC Berkeley (Class of 2023).
Currently enrolled at USC's Game Design and
Development Master's program (expected graduation: 2025).
For inquiries, email me at: bluekkachi.dev@gmail.com
I also go by "Bluekkachi".
All of my social media can be found down below in the Links section.
Generally speaking, I do not use social media. If it's not linked here, it's probably not me.
Guide the trains to their destinations!
Winner of Bear Jams Fall 2022.
Estimated playtime of 5-10 minutes.
A simple puzzle game, made for UC Berkeley's
Bear Jams Fall 2022,
a 45-hour game jam held from October 28th to October 30th.
I led our impromptu team of 6 by establishing a clear project vision and breaking
down the tasks required to reach our own destination.
Credits: Producer, Designer, Artist (pixel)
A turn-based RPG with visual novel-style story cutscenes.
The demo contains
about an hour of content.
Follow an unlikely trio on their journey up to defeat the Obsidian Drake atop Anvite
Mountain.
Features a unique Augment Battle System, allowing players to modify moves to create
various effects.
Trailthread has been in development since Spring 2020. I am responsible for the
game's pixel art and helped with the design and production process. I currently help
with testing and polish. (Made in a team of 4.)
As
Designer…
This is a game we made for ourselves, that
eventually grew to be a product we could distribute to others.
Trailthread's battle system is the reason it exists. It was inspired by
games like
Bravely Default, Shin Megami Tensei, and Granblue Fantasy,
in how all three
games let you play with fun buff and debuff stacking to manage your stats and
damage.
Credits: Producer, Director, Artist, Lead Programmer, etc.
A bite-sized JRPG experience (~5-10 minutes). I was the project lead, along with
being the sole pixel artist and programming lead on a team of 4. Ghost Quest
was the first experience I completed.
Play as a ghost who was kicked out of your body by an evil force.
Left with the power to travel between the material and spiritual world,
embark on a journey to take your body back from the rude being that robbed you.
Made for UC Berkeley's Game Design and Development DeCal course.
(Course information
| "What is a DeCal?")
As
Director…
Ghost Quest was pitched as "a game that can be used to create other
games." We
only had about a month to complete it, and our team was all new to Unity. Thus,
our main goal was to create frameworks for basic systems needed to create a
larger game, rather than trying to make a full-fledged RPG off the bat.
I consider the project a success, as we achieved what we set out to do.
Additionally, the act of finishing a project successfully gave me the momentum
and confidence to try diving deeper into game development. Should I be drawn
back to the Unity engine for whatever reason, I still have Ghost Quest's
code
and basic event systems to use as a starting point.
My project writeups from UC Berkeley's Computer Graphics course. I programmed
various computer graphics-related projects, including
a ray-tracer, a cloth simulator, various shaders, a triangle mesh generator, a
rasterizer, and more.
For the class's final project, I led a team of 4 in implementing a cel shader in
Unity's Universal Render Pipeline.
Credits: Director, Producer, Designer, Artist (pixel), Lead Programmer
A 15-20 minute, top-down, 2D adventure RPG.
Four people wake up in an unfamiliar setting and must work together to unravel the
mysteries behind their circumstances. No clear answers are presented, but even so, a
decision must be made, and you must
press on…
Made using the Godot Engine (ver. 3.5) as a side project with a team of 8.
Development spanned spring to summer 2023, with polish lasting from fall to winter
2023.
This was my first time recruiting people for a project--it was also my first time
acting as an interviewer rather than interviewee. I acted as creative director,
producer, and lead programmer. I learned a lot about Godot, project management, and
what goes into directing a game as
I taught my fellow programmers and myself the engine parallel to development.
As
Director…
My primary goal with Stray Stars was to evoke how I feel when I finish a
Shin Megami Tensei game. If I had to put it into words, I've described
this
feeling as being "empty, yet full." …As you can likely tell, I'm not very good
at putting that feeling into words. So I tried conveying it through this game
instead.
Looking back, the game's themes of uncertain truths and unverifiable
circumstances were also inspired by Umineko: When They Cry. Similar to
how Umineko and Shin Megami Tensei are to me, I will be satisfied
if Stray Stars can also be the kind of odd game that creeps into your
memory from time to time.
A 2D pixel RPG with fourth-wall breaking elements at its core.
Take control of Will, a young boy, in a game whose contents have been corrupted for
mysterious reasons. The game makes use of "metapuzzles," where players must move
game files around or do other "meta" tasks beyond the game window to solve puzzles.
Free Will was made with a team of 20 as an MFA thesis project for USC's
Interactive Media and
Games department. It began development in Summer 2023 and released
on Steam for Windows on May 7, 2024.
As producer, I acted as the director's assistant in delegating
tasks, solving production issues, and communicating across departments. In addition,
my role as art lead lended me a strong vision for how the game should look and feel
to play. My background in programming was helpful in communicating to the
programming team about asset implementation and general game feel.
As the art lead, I primarily assigned tasks to our team's 3 other artists and drew
all sprite animations.
If it's pixel and it moves, it was drawn by me.
The game's UI style—namely its dialogue, inventory, and battle screens—were also
designed by me.
As
Lead Artist…
Part of the vision for Free Will was for it to look like it was "clearly
a
game." Thus, we shot for a retro, pixel RPG look that doubled an homage to the
RPG Maker games that inspired it, such as Oneshot, Ib, and The Witch's
House.
In crafting its aesthetic style, I primarily drew inspiration from EarthBound
Zero/Beginnings, Pokémon Red and Blue, and a lesser-known game called
Azusa 999.
As
Producer…
Free Will's production process and execution has received high praise
from the USC community. Student productions rarely ever release at the end of
the spring semester, but Free Will is an outlier in this regard. It was
the first game to be available fully on Steam out of any of the other thesis
projects shown.
This is largely thanks to the team, who did the tasks I assigned them as
producer. That said, flexible planning played a large part in the game's
successful production process. The director and I worked closely to scope the
game down to about one semester's worth of work (Fall) and allocated the spring
semester for polish and bleed over. As planned, the project did bleed over into
spring, but even with this spillover we were able to fit in about a full month
of polish.
Though on release the game still had a few rough edges and a version 1.1 already
in the pipeline, namely for a streamer-friendly mode due to the game's
peculiarities, it being ready for release at all is considered something of a
miracle as far as USC MFA projects go.
A 15-20 minute story about Poly, a sentient eraser dealing with sentient eraser
problems.
Available for Windows and Mac, though please play the Windows version if you can. I
couldn't figure
out how to make a shader work for the Mac build, so it is technically inferior.
The game was made for Tracy Fullerton's game design class at USC with Unity, using
her
experience goal-oriented proccess of game development and design. I was lead
programmer, and worked with two
classmates to make the game in about a month during winter 2023. We released it a
few months later once
I had time to add finishing touches to the game to address final playtest feedback
we received.
Overall I'm quite satisfied with how this game came out, and the process that went
into crafting the game
is one that resonated with me as well. I've always tried to place heavy focus on
player experience,
so Prof. Fullerton's method felt like a more mature version of what I'd previously
been striving to accomplish.
As
Lead Programmer (and a designer)…
The idea for this game came from my teammate, Sam. He also did all the art. Check his other work out here.
My other teammate Nile helped with everything else. Check him out here.
Since this was a class project, our 3-man team had constraints to work with: the
game "had to have a story" and it "had to be delivered in around 10-15 minutes".
There's a background story of sorts about a parent and child, and we aimed for a
fun and
wholesome narrative.
In terms of programming, this game was quite simple. As a Unity game, it runs
mainly on YarnSpinner, loading in custom
scenes for the "gameplay" segments, where we pass in arguments to load certain
images or behaviors.
I got to flex my brief computer vision experience from Berkeley here in
calculating the player's progress, and my graphics experience in rigging shaders
I found online to
play nice with the game.
(For the record, the Mac issue is a build-only issue.
It works fine in editor on my Mac, which is what I used to develop the game,
so…)
The final level was my idea and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.
Hopefully you enjoy it as well!
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